NASA’s Solar Probe Plus (SPP) mission will make the first in situ measurements of the solar corona and the birthplace of the solar wind. The FIELDS instrument suite on SPP will make direct measurements of electric and magnetic fields, the properties of in situ plasma waves, electron density and temperature profiles, and interplanetary radio emissions, amongst other things. Here, we describe the scientific objectives targeted by the SPP/FIELDS instrument, the instrument design itself, and the instrument concept of operations and planned data products.

Nonradiating electromagnetic configurations in nanostructures open new horizons for applications due to two essential features: a lack of energy losses and invisibility to the propagating electromagnetic field. Such radiationless configurations form a basis for new types of nanophotonic devices, in which a strong electromagnetic field confinement can be achieved together with lossless interactions between nearby components. In our work, we present a new design of free-standing disk nanoantennas with nonradiating current distributions for the optical near-infrared range. We show a novel approach to creating nanoantennas by slicing III-V nanowires into standing disks using focused ion-beam milling. We experimentally demonstrate the suppression of the far-field radiation and the associated strong enhancement of the second-harmonic generation from the disk nanoantennas. With a theoretical analysis of the electromagnetic field distribution using multipole expansions in both spherical and Cartesian coordinates, we confirm that the demonstrated nonradiating configurations are anapoles. We expect that the presented procedure of designing and producing disk nanoantennas from nanowires becomes one of the standard approaches to fabricating controlled chains of standing nanodisks with different designs and configurations. These chains can be essential building blocks for new types of lasers and sensors with low power consumption.

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High-index III–V semiconductor nanoantennas have gained great attention for enhanced nonlinear light–matter interactions, in the past few years. However, the complexity of nonlinear emission profiles imposes severe constraints on practical applications, such as in optical communications and integrated optoelectronic devices. These complexities include the lack of unidirectional nonlinear emission and the severe challenges in switching between forward and backward emissions, due to the structure of the susceptibility tensor of the III–V nanoantennas. Here, we propose a solution to both issues via engineering the nonlinear tensor of the nanoantennas. The special nonlinear tensorial properties of zinc-blende material can be used to engineer the nonlinear characteristics via growing the nanoantennas along different crystalline orientations. Based on the nonlinear multipolar effect, we have designed and fabricated (110)-grown GaAs nanoantennas, with engineered tensorial properties, embedded in a transparent low-index material. Our technique provides an approach not only for unidirectional second-harmonic generation (SHG) forward or backward emission but also for switching from one to another. Importantly, switching the SHG emission directionality is obtained only by rotating the polarization of the incident light, without the need for physical variation of the antennas or the environment. This characteristic is an advantage, as compared to other nonlinear nanoantennas, including (100)- and (111)-grown III–V counterparts or silicon and germanium nanoantennas. Indeed, (110)-GaAs nanoantennas allow for engineering the nonlinear nanophotonic systems including nonlinear “Huygens metasurfaces” and offer exciting opportunities for various nonlinear nanophotonics technologies, such as nanoscale light routing and light sources, as well as multifunctional flat optical elements.